You belong to a Supreme Court fan club don’t you. Admit it Mister Bayrow you do you do. You get the fan club magazine. You write love letters to the judges, you want to marry the lady one.
“Justices,” he said.
“Sandra Day O’Connor,” he said.
We heard you can name every Supreme Court judge ever, can you name every president, every country in the world, every NFL quarterback, every McDonald’s, but really is it true about the Supreme Court?
Victor clarified, “Every chief justice.”
The day of the Supreme Court building each year—field trip tradition—he recited for the freshmen travelers the nation’s chief justices in order, starting with John Jay and John Rutledge, building toward Salmon Chase, the students not caring that Chase was appointed by Lincoln but fascinated that a parent would name a boy Salmon, through Warren Berger and now William Rehnquist. Is Rehnquist your favorite. “No, not even close.” Who’s your favorite. “Earl Warren.” Why. “It would take an hour to explain.” No need to mention the justice named Bushrod.
He knew its address—1 First Street NE—the way the other social studies teachers knew 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The courtroom would be empty but it would still be the courtroom. The steps would still be the steps. The pillars the pillars. The courtroom of Brown v. Board of Education. Tinker v. Des Moines. Korematsu. Roe. Miranda. Though not the building of Marbury v. Madison. He owned a scales of justice tie and a tie with little gavels. Teacher ties. Not from when he secretaried at Nevler & Koag, Attorneys at Law, Chicago, Illinois.
Victor Bayrow’s students could ask things that kept his job gratifying: Why would they build the capital here? Why couldn’t they come up with a more creative name than White House? Than Washington? Questions he hadn’t considered at their age. But, in the ninth-grade corridor, Corr-9, the way they yelped and yawped, jostled each other and punched, always the physical contact the open or closed hands the shoulders the squeaking and kicking. When he stood outside his classroom supervising passing time, the clamor of their voices and their awkward, violent bodies made him ask, How can monitoring this stampede be called teaching? Everyone on staff dubbed Corr-9 The Wildlife Preserve.
“It’s always something new in Victor’s room,” the department chair had bragged to the principal, and she’d been right. Students in costumes for presentations on the feudal system. Victor himself in costume for Shays’ Rebellion. Massive construction paper collages taking up most of the Corr-9 wall space outside his classroom. Yo-yos. Stuffed animals. Beach balls. Students in small circles with Legos or Lincoln Logs. Kids playing their clarinets and saxophones for his class.
So many children. Two buses of young teenagers. Either last semester or this, he’d taught most of them. Children who don’t sleep because they’re four to a room, four ninth-grade boys to a room, four ninth-grade girls to a room, drinking Coke and eating Three Musketeers and Gobstoppers and Doritos at two in the morning, powder everywhere, orange powder on the bedspreads and pillows, crumbs on the nightstands and bathroom counters. The hotel must want to use a flamethrower when they leave.
Is the Supreme Court near the People’s Court? Are we meeting the president? Can we give him a ride on our bus? Can I sit next to him? Does Reagan still get to live in the White House or did he get kicked out? How come Washington just gets a concrete stick? How do you know they don’t relight the flame every day before people wake up?
Tracey Welk was missing. Eighty-seven students were on this trip, and Victor knew where eighty-six of them were: here in the Air and Space Museum, in their groups, near the chaperones, within shouting distance of the exit. It was possible that Tracey Welk was also in the Air and Space Museum—merely separated from her partners. Maybe in a bathroom stall. Or behind a display, actually reading the narrative it provided. It was also possible that she was not in the museum. Victor’s thoughts were like a short-stringed paddle ball, bouncing out and back between safe in the museum and abducted by a sick monster.
The fact that Tracey Welk was missing, this was Victor’s problem: Victor ran the trip. He had booked the hotels and buses, had spoken with the museums and the boat company that would take them on the Potomac cruise, had explained the trip’s details five months ago to the mothers and fathers and grandparents in the school cafeteria at the kickoff meeting. It was always a social studies teacher who ran the Washington trip. For the last three years it had been Victor. Parents had asked about safety, about how closely the chaperones would monitor the kids.
“Relax, Vic. She’s just being weird,” Mike Guzek said. Goozer, who taught physical science, clamped Victor’s shoulder and kneaded it quickly and deeply. “That Welk girl is a space cadet. She saw the moon rocks and thought she was home and got confused.” Tracey was the youngest of four Welks; the other three were all athletes. Her brother now played football for Boyne College, and the sister just above Tracey carried the varsity softball, volleyball, and girls’ basketball teams on her back. Tracey hadn’t picked up a ball of any kind in years, and the cadre of coaches at the junior high and high school, Mike Guzek included, held this against the youngest Welk. Since the girl couldn’t shoot a basketball or hit home runs, finding her, be it in the expanse of the museum or on D.C.’s streets, seemed less urgent.
Tracey was in Joyce Silasko’s group. Joyce taught art and she had the pants to prove it—less like slacks and more like hiking trousers with splotches of paint on the thighs and knees. Some smudges of clay, too.
Victor should have had a missing kid strategy, but this hadn’t happened the last two years. Any protocol the school had for lost students probably lay snapped in a binder in a storage room’s dim corner, near laughably outdated science texts.
Victor had four or five boys per semester who knew too much shit about war. They could name battles and generals he’d never heard of. And weapons. Tracey Welk, though: she knew that there was more to history than trebuchets and Enfields. She could tell you something about Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dust Bowl, and other people and moments that didn’t involve maneuvers or explosions. Please, not Tracey. Not any kid, but not Tracey. Be on a bench, daydreaming. She once told one of the camouflage boys, “If you can name every kind of gun fired in the Civil War but you don’t know who Sojourner Truth is, you should be on a list.” He wanted to sprint through the museum yelling her name, knocking down glass cases. Be unharmed.
What are we doing Mister Bayrow. are we leaving? Can we go, can we get on the bus, are we going back to the hotel? The students were in fixed groups for the whole week, groups of seven or eight and matched to a teacher or a parent chaperone, but as they gathered in the lobby, thinking it was time to go, because it was time to go, the groups merged and broke apart and swirled back together, new configuration after new configuration. It was brackish—the tidal, gravitational mix of different waters. Boys. Girls. Boys and girls together. This was how to lose another kid.
Victor had a plan. He and Joyce would march through each room as a pair, synchronized, as if holding two ends of a long irrigation pipe. He’d take the left. Joyce could check the women’s bathrooms and Victor, for the sake of unturned stones, would inspect the men’s. Victor would give his students to Goozer. Joyce’s group—they’d go to Angela McCauley. Angela taught algebra and remedial math. She could handle seven more students. She could handle a hundred more. The lunch joke was that Angela self-imposed a quota of two crying kids per month. “Check off October,” she’d announce, “and it’s only the twelfth.”
He gathered his eight boys and told them, “I have to run an errand in another part of the museum. Stay within sight of Mr. Guzek. Nobody goes to the bathroom. Nobody does anything. We’re leaving for the Supreme Court in a few minutes.”
Is someone missing Mister Bayrow, is someone in trouble? I heard somebody got lost, I heard somebody got arrested for shoplifting, I heard it was for trying to steal an airplane. I want to steal an airplane. I heard it was Tracey Welk. Tracey’s in jail. The museum has a jail doesn’t it Mister Bayrow, like a mall jail. Malls don’t have jails. Yes they do. How do you know is it because you’ve been in mall jail. I heard it was Tracey Welk. Somebody already said that dummy. She would get lost. That’s so Tracey Welk of her. She couldn’t fly a plane. Like you could. They don’t keep gas in these airplanes. Did you check, did you try to siphon it? She’s probably not even in the museum, she probably wandered into a bad neighborhood, I heard there are crack houses around here, Tracey is having crack with the mayor. You don’t have crack you dipshit. How would you know? You live a bad neighborhood. So what you live on the same street almost.
“She’s in the building,” Victor said. “I already spoke with security. She just got separated from her group.” He ignored his churning stomach. How could Tracey have been… separated? Even in his own head he dodged the word kidnapped. “Mister Guzek,” he said, attempting calm formality, “these eight young men are now yours.”
—
At Nevler & Koag Victor had been responsible for almost nothing. He typed addresses onto envelopes, made copies, lugged boxes to and from the basement storage using the freight elevator, carried thick manila envelopes to other law firms in the Loop, and walked to the various courthouses and handed over whatever the lawyers had given to him to hand over. I am a glorified homing pigeon, he had thought. But on spring mornings when the sun gleamed on the towers and the Brown Line clacked energetically, strolling on Wacker near the Chicago River bridges, he relished his role as a messenger bird. He could have kept this menial job forever.
—
Tracey Welk drew cartoon characters on his chalkboard: Tweety Bird and Garfield’s dog Odie and the Ghostbusters ghost. Victor bought boxes of colored chalk and kept them on the tray for her. What if Tracey had left the museum? What if someone had her?
Joyce said, “She’s in this building.”
“God, I hope so.” His voice almost broke. The knots in his chest and throat and gut kept him from breathing.
“She hasn’t left. I recognize her.” Joyce used two fingers to rub her forehead. “Yes. It’s Tracey.”
“What’s Tracey?”
“Her energy.”
Until this moment he had liked Joyce. In the staff lounge instead of bitching about students, she shared what she’d been reading in the New York Times or National Geographic. He had thought of her as New Agey, but not as embarrassingly New Agey. She and Victor sometimes traded Chicago stories—Joyce went every few months for movies and plays and galleries.
Tracey might be in danger—he didn’t want to hear about Joyce Silasko’s ESP rescue methods.
They swerved around teenagers and entered the first exhibit room. “You take the right side,” he said. Victor was carrying a long black umbrella, and he indicated with it. His Nevler & Koag umbrella. He’d meant to leave it on the bus, but when they were disembarking, boys had started pushing near the top of the bus stairs. Victor had jammed the umbrella between the boys, who whined that they’d just been playing around. “You can still fall down the stairs and break a leg or a collarbone, even when you’re just playing,” he’d snapped. Increasingly, he heard himself spouting things said only by old people. Two hours later, he was still hauling around the umbrella. In his other hand he clutched a museum map and a pen. “Walk fast. Wait for each other at the far end,” he told Joyce. “We’ll start the next gallery together. Let’s be methodical.”
It seemed like every school in the country was on a field trip in D.C. The first room, high-ceilinged and echoey, was nothing but thirteen-year-olds and fourteen-year-olds. All of the room’s five hundred kids were trying to talk over the other four hundred ninety-nine. Too many girls with Tracey’s crimped brown hair. Tracey? No. No. Kids and more kids, loud and indifferent to the achievements of flight, congested the space. He slipped between and behind them. No Tracey in that group, or along that wall, or on that bench. Victor reached the end and stopped in the doorway. Hooking the umbrella handle on his wrist and unfolding the map, he clicked the pen and put a heavy X over the room.
Workers exposed to regular and excruciating noise took the ringing and roaring with them wherever they went. That’s what his students’ voices were like: You don’t think she’s in the building, do you Mister Bayrow? You think a stranger took her. You think she’s kidnapped, like one of those kids on TV, like one of those kids on the milk. How long will it take to put Tracey on a milk carton?
Joyce emerged, coming more from the center of the room than Victor would have liked, navigating around students wearing identical white t-shirts: Smyrna to Washington 8th Grade Trip, above a silhouette of the Capitol Dome.
“This is the right direction,” Joyce said.
Victor nodded.
“I don’t think she’s in the next room, but she’s not far.”
“Let’s start the next room, anyway.”
“You don’t have to worry.”
“It would help if you knew when and where you lost her.”
Joyce nodded, as if she’d been waiting for his blame. “You can’t remove all freedom from young people, just because it’s a school field trip. We are in the nation’s capital, after all.”
“The trip has chaperones for a reason. We do head counts for a reason.”
“We will find Tracey, and next week we’ll be back at school, business as usual, so let’s not say things that will be difficult to take back.”
Joyce spoke with a tranquility that made him drop whatever salvo would have been next. Victor looked at his watch—each elapsed second heightened the risk. “Next room.” He squeezed the umbrella handle until his knuckles ached. He could hear Tracey’s voice: “Thanks for the chalk, Mister Bayrow. Who should I draw: Snoopy or Hobbes?” They had to find her. She had to be all right. Veering to the left, he began the second room. More huddles of teenagers, more bellowing, more brown Tracey hair.
Teaching. Victor was thirty-two. It didn’t seem possible that he’d made all of the career choices he ever would make. But if not teaching, then what? Law school? Why—because of Nevler & Koag? Because he’d carried legal documents from one building in the Loop to another? Because he read books about the history of the Supreme Court? That didn’t seem like a terrible reason.
His first year at Northwestern, he’d wanted to be a famous historian. Somewhere between freshman year and the spring of graduation, he figured out there was a difference between reading The Guns of August, however enthusiastically, and much of it a second time—and writing The Guns of August. After graduation, he settled on a more acquiescent goal: to stay in Chicago. To not let go of the bookstores and record stores, the parks and the trains and the hot dogs and the lakefront. The buildings: the stone and the steel, the Carl Sandburg-ness of Chicago. With a history degree from Northwestern University he found work as a hotel doorman, and as a mover of office furniture, and as a beer vendor at Blackhawks games.
He could have gone home to Kankakee. His older brother had stayed, earned an associate’s degree from the community college, and joined their dad’s cement-pouring business. There would have been a job for Victor, if he’d wanted it, and a chance to take over the company with his brother someday.
When young professionals in suits stayed in the hotel on business, Victor thought about the college degrees they were using.
It was another beer vendor who told him about the teacher program for people who had already gone to college. He could teach history to high school students.
—
Victor had met recently with his department chair and his principal. The plan was to shift a few advanced classes from Stan Cook, who had been teaching for thirty years, to Victor. “I’m not giving you a choice in the matter,” his principal had said. “That way Stan can’t get too furious with you.” They also wanted Victor to start a new class: a one-semester course on the Supreme Court and its landmark cases. Only seniors could take it. His principal had called him “the building’s rising star.”
The department chair was retiring in two years; Victor was to be her successor, the rock upon whom they built the social studies department.
—
In a pack of girls he thought he saw Tracey Welk. He approached the hair-sprayed bunch, and they looked at Victor with puzzlement and disdain. He spun away and continued. Past astronaut helmets that he ignored. Space flight didn’t matter. A boy belched. A look of accusation from a heavy man in a guard uniform, as if Victor were the kid’s chaperone.
Joyce was not in the doorway yet. Victor re-opened the museum guide. Please, be somewhere on this map. Be in one of these shaded rectangles. If only he could conjure a glowing dot—like a dark Lite Brite canvas with a single pink peg pushed in—showing him the spot where Tracey was alive and untouched, having an innocent conversation with a child from Texas or Connecticut about cartoons.
—
Once he enrolled in the teaching program, Victor needed a different job. The late nights at the hockey games and the flip-flopping hotel shifts wouldn’t work. At the employment agency he said he wasn’t picky, but he was loading up on night classes so he’d need to punch out by five o’clock. Which is how he ended up at Nevler & Koag.
“How are you going to dress?” Mr. Nevler asked him during the interview. Except for some thin white hair along the sides of his head, the old man was bald. Age spots marked his cheeks and the backs of his hands. “We’ve never had a male secretary.”
Victor was wearing a jacket and tie, but they didn’t really match. “How is this?”
Nevler studied him. “Forget the coat. You’re not a lawyer.”
Victor smoothed his green tie, feeling its cheapness.
“Northwestern?” Nevler asked.
“Yes, sir. Is that your school?”
“No.”
What would Nevler—who’d gone to Harvard—think of him now, eight years later, wrangling freshmen, looking for a lost girl, enduring assurances from Joyce and her crystal ball that Tracey Welk was safe and only a few rooms away?
—
Victor’s nod to more traditional social studies methods was his love of timelines. The sequencing of pegs, especially when one little tick truly did cause the next one, mattered to Victor. He hoped each mark could evoke for his students a turning point in history: a shift in technology, or the end of a way of life.
Anything not from this century his students thought of as ancient times. The American Revolution, Martin Luther, and Emperor Constantine—to kids, anything that far back felt just as long ago as anything else. He’d once thought this way. His father had served in the Navy, on a ship in the Pacific. “It wasn’t too bad where I was.” Victor’s dad would say nothing else about the war. His cousin had died in Okinawa—they’d grown up a few blocks apart and had graduated from high school together. Their photos were side by side in the yearbook.
Now that Victor could remember some history that his students couldn’t—Watergate, the first moon landing—his father’s time in the war felt more recent, even as it receded. Kennedy’s assassination should be one of Victor’s first memories, but all he could summon from 1963 was his older brother’s birthday party at a park on the Kankakee River. A three-legged race that he watched but did not run. A warm slide. A piece of yellow cake.
Outside the Bayrow family, nobody would ever make a timeline that included their cousin’s death.
—
Victor followed the hand on his watch for twenty-five seconds. Still no Joyce. What if she had gone faster this time and was now two rooms ahead, or stepping onto the escalator? He shouldn’t budge. Leaving this spot would cause a domino effect of missing people. But if somebody was about to drag Tracey out the door, he couldn’t stay on this spot with his head up his ass. Was he going to McClellan the situation—freeze up, afraid to make a decisive move? Victor wanted to scream at Joyce. He wanted to swing the umbrella and smash the museum to rubble and drive the hordes out until the only thing left standing was Tracey.
—
At Nevler & Koag, Victor overheard Nevler berate the firm’s other lawyers. He summoned them to his office and called them dumb-ass pieces of shit. Victor and the other two secretaries weren’t attorneys, so their immense ignorance went without saying. They weren’t worth the syllables it would take. When Nevler acknowledged Victor at all, he called him “Schoolteacher.”
Had Nevler argued before the Supreme Court? It seemed possible. Decades ago. In the skyscraper basement Victor glanced at the boxes and the clients’ names they bore: City of Park Ridge. B. Myjach. Delaware Square Condo Association. Did one of these contain an opinion from Earl Warren himself?
Victor formatted documents. He prepared cover sheets. “Dear Judge Brannigan: For your review, enclosed herewith is a courtesy copy…” He rushed out at 4:56. Train to bus to a four-block walk to campus to a six o’clock class: about pedagogy or economics or American history since the Civil War.
Henry Koag sometimes asked Victor about his classes. “I once memorized the English monarchs, going back a century before William the Conqueror,” he said. “Not anymore. There’s a jumble of Edwards and Henrys in the 1400s I can’t keep straight. You’d think I’d get the Henrys right.” Koag had curly hair the color of wet sand and a moustache. He looked at least twenty-five years younger than Nevler. That was something else Victor never found out: how Nevler and Koag had become partners.
Nevler started missing days. He had cancer. The office manager, Gina, said that Mr. Nevler had two or three months to live. Victor asked, “Will I still have a job—after?”
“If I do,” she said. “He’s loaded. He and his wife could have spent the last ten years on a beach. Instead he’ll die rich and miserable.”
—
Please be in this building. Please, please tell me you are here, that you are fine. That no one has touched you. Victor wanted Goozer to be right. Be standing rigid in front of a moon rock, unaware that your group has abandoned you. He would give Joyce another ninety seconds. Then he’d run back to the entrance, tell Goozer and Angela that Joyce had screwed up the simplest of plans. He’d sweep each gallery himself, running as fast as the guards would let him, making full circles in every room. Joyce had sixty seconds.
—
Nevler was in the hospital. It was raining hard and Victor had forgotten his umbrella. Those were the months that he was living with Jennifer, who toted her umbrella on the sunniest of mornings and the radio saying maybe a few clouds but nothing more. Victor would counterbalance her caution by leaving his own umbrella home, even on gloomy days. A few months later, while Victor was student teaching, Jennifer took a job in Los Angeles. As far as he knew she was still there, but she could have moved to Texas, Vancouver, or Paris by now and he would have no way of finding out. He’d lived alone ever since. Friends on staff kept telling him to buy a house and get married. He’d dated two teachers in the district—one taught second grade and the other sixth.
Victor was supposed to deliver a file to a firm south of the Loop. “There’s an umbrella rack in Mr. Nevler’s office, behind the door,” Gina told him. “Take your pick.” There were at least eight, all either black or navy, all of them long with curved handles.
“This feels expensive,” he said to Gina, holding up the umbrella at its midsection. The navy was a few shades darker than the blazer Gina wore—her jacket’s shoulders looking like a phone book was hidden in each. She handed him a large envelope and pointed to the address.
“Keep it. Take another one the next time it rains.”
Victor was three months from student teaching when Nevler died. The office closed for the funeral, and he sat with Gina and the other secretaries at the service and the luncheon, while the lawyers sat separately. He was on the clock; it was the strangest way he had ever earned money. Rain threatened, but Victor chose to bring his flimsy green umbrella with the bent rib. During the funeral, Victor thought, What if Nevler left me something? What if he wanted me to go to law school? Victor hadn’t even finished his teaching program, and now he was going to do it again? Back to back to school?
—
From behind him, Joyce said, “Here we are.” There was Tracey Welk, hunched beside her, pinching her left knuckles with her right hand.
—
One of his turning points as a student of history came when he realized that people have always lived with uncertainty. It’s only once a sequence of events is codified in a textbook that what happened appears as inevitable. Just because it’s written down now doesn’t mean it was scripted then. Victor had an activity where students wrote ten predictions about what the country and the world would look like in ten years—technology, Russia, music and TV shows, natural disasters, nuclear arms negotiations, Super Bowl and World Series winners. Then they moved around the classroom finding people whose answers directly contradicted their own.
“See how much we don’t know? So much is up in the air,” he said after they were back in their desks. “Pick a year at any time in the past, and people felt the same way. Take somebody in Virginia in 1856. Make them write down what the next ten years are going to look like. Take somebody in France in 1910. It feels to us like they should see what’s coming because one thing after another happens in the textbook, like a meticulous plan. But they didn’t know what was coming. They did not know.”
—
She’d found Tracey. There was Tracey. Looking unscathed. Not limping or crying or bearing any scratches on her face. There was Tracey. Thank God.
Joyce said, “She is here and well and that is what’s important. We can leave her alone—she just got a little turned around.”
Tracey said, “I’m sorry, Mister Bayrow. I hope I didn’t mess anything up.”
—
Angela McCauley told the students that anyone who teased Tracey about getting lost would sit on the bus tomorrow. “I’ve toured the White House and Ford’s Theater. No skin off my back if me and you stay on the bus all day with a bologna sandwich for lunch.”
The kids knew she did not issue empty threats.
As the students boarded the two buses, Victor mumbled to Joyce, “Where did you find her?”
“I promised I wouldn’t say a word. She’s telling her group she got separated and so she sat on a bench and waited to be found.”
“Was she in the bathroom?”
“I’m sorry I left you behind. I suddenly knew where she was.”
It would be rushed, but they would tour the courtroom.
What do you call a five-minute tour of the Supreme Court building?
One that doesn’t do it justice.
And if he asked Joyce to hold his umbrella on the Supreme Court steps so he could snap a photo, and if she twitched her arm unexpectedly, what would he want to know? That Nevler himself had unfurled this umbrella in D.C., holding it aloft as he walked north on First Street, the Supreme Court ahead and to the right? That Victor would, during a cold rain in March, take a case, just once, to this courtroom? That Victor would lead students here year after year, and that they would appreciate the sometimes beautiful sometimes odious nature of the law, even when it didn’t look like they were learning a thing? Whatever she revealed, Victor might be willing to believe her.